Ravinia 2019, Issue 5, Week 10

ANGEL BLUE, soprano A native of Apple Valley, CA, soprano Angel Blue began studying music at age 7 with piano lessons and graduated from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. A former Miss Hollywood and first runner-up as Miss Cali- fornia, she matriculated to UCLA and earned a Master of Music in opera performance. After attending the Canadian Vocal Arts Program in 2007 and the young artist program of Los Angeles Opera for three years from its 2006 inception, Blue won both the Zarzuela Prize and second prize in the Operalia Competition in 2009 and became a member of the Centre Perfeccionament Plácido Domingo—the op- era studio of the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, Spain—until 2011. She has just returned from the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, where she made her role debut as Puccini’s titular Tosca, and earlier this season Blue starred as Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata at London’s Royal Opera at Covent Garden (making her house debut) and La Scala and as Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème with the Canadian Opera Company and Sem- peroper Dresden. Mimì was the vehicle of her Metropolitan Opera debut in 2017; she recently returned to the Met as Musetta in the same op- era (which she has also sung at La Scala), and she will portray the title role of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in the company’s new production this fall. Blue’s repertoire also includes Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust , Mozart’s Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni , Liù in Puccini’s Turandot , the title roles of Verdi’s Luisa Miller and Puccini’s Suor Angelica , and Giulietta and Antonia in Offen- bach’s The Tales of Hoffmann , and she has also taken bows with Vienna State Opera, Frankfurt Opera, Theater an der Wien, Seattle Opera, San Diego Opera, and San Francisco Opera, among other companies. She is the CEO of the nonprof- it Sylvia’s Kids, which supports inner-city high- school graduates in continuing their studies. To- night Angel Blue is making her Ravinia debut, and tomorrow afternoon she will be leading a master class for Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute Program for Singers. CATHERINE MILLER, piano Pianist Catherine Miller is active as a recitalist with classical singers and a member of the music staff at San Diego Opera. This season she served as the rehearsal pianist for the Los Angeles Phil- harmonic’s production of Sibelius’s The Tempest under the baton of Susanna Mälkki, and she will be working as rehearsal pianist and coach for Verdi’s Rigoletto with San Diego Opera in Jan- uary 2020. In the various capacities of pianist, vocal coach, and prompter, Miller has worked with Los Angeles Opera, Opera Pacific, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Opera Santa Barbara, the Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile, and for the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Recent recital ap- pearances include accompanying soprano Angel Blue at the Kennedy Center for the Vocal Arts DC series as well as soprano Jamie Chamberlin and tenor Nathan Granner for Long Beach Op- era for the LA Made series at the Los Angeles Public Library. Miller has also appeared with Blue at London’s Wigmore Hall and in recital for the Redlands Symphony, and other recitals have brought her to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, and the Chiesa Santa Mar- gherita in Vernazza, Italy. As an educator, Miller has worked for California State University–Long Beach, University of Southern California, the Herb Alpert School of Music at the UCLA, and the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival. She is also the pianist and artistic consultant for the Men- toris Project Vocal Competition, the official ac- companist for the Metropolitan Opera Council Auditions in the Los Angeles District, and the official pianist for the Loren L. Zachary Vocal Competition. Miller holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Southern Cali- fornia and a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School, and she was a Fulbright Schol- ar at the Liszt Academy in Budapest. Catherine Miller is making her Ravinia debut. for the complex cross-pollination of Anglo Eu- ropean and African American musical styles. African American spirituals combined scriptur- al quotations with extemporized lamentations. Texts emphasized Biblical stories of deliverance from bondage as metaphors for freedom from slavery. Frederick Douglass remembered this underlying meaning from his years in slavery: “A keen observer might have detected in our re- peating of ‘OCanaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan’ something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North , and the North was our Canaan.” Immediately after the Civil War, African Ameri- can spirituals experienced a rapid dissemination throughout the (re-)United States (particularly in the North) through concert tours by black choral organizations like the Fisk University Jubilee Singers. Published choral arrangements also circulated widely. In recent years, the vast treasury of spirituals has found an important place in solo vocal recitals. “Deep River” first appeared in print in 1877 as part of the seventh edition of J.B.T. Marsh’s The Story of the Jubilee Singers: With Their Songs as a solo melody rather than in four-part harmoni- zation. The absence of prior citations and, even more convincingly, documentation over the next quarter-century, has suggested to schol- ars such as Wayne D. Shirley that “Deep River” did not attract widespread attention until 1905, when Samuel Coleridge Taylor included its mel- ody in his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies Tran- scribed for the Piano . The well-known spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” also made a late appearance in print, when its lyrics were published in Arthur Huff Fauset’s 1927 article “Negro Folk Tales from the South,” where its origins were traced to Tus- kegee, AL. That year, words and music appeared in Edward Boatner’s Spirituals Triumphant—Old and New . Boatner (1898–1981) was born in New Orleans, the son of a former slave/itinerant min- ister, and died in New York City. After musical studies at Western University in Kansas and the Boston Conservatory of Music, he received a degree from Chicago Musical College. A singer, composer, arranger, and educator, Boatner ush- ered hundreds of African American spirituals into print and published the Story of the Spiritu- al: Thirty Spirituals and Their Origins . “Ride On, King Jesus”—an early version of which, “No Man Can Hinder Me,” appeared in Slave Songs of the United States (1867)—is a victorious statement of faith alluding to Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. This spiritual demonstrated wide variance in the first publi- cations, eventually standardizing with Harry T. Burleigh’s Jubilee Songs of the United States of America (1916). –Program notes © 2019 Todd E. Sullivan RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 5 – AUGUST 11, 2019 100